"I used to think
it would take a great financial crisis to get both
parties to the table, but we just had one," said G.
William Hoagland, a former adviser to the Senate
Republican leadership on fiscal policy.

At its heart is a fiscal crisis.
After the 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion, we are running
a 2010 deficit of $1.6 trillion. Trillion-dollar
deficits are projected through the Obama years, be they
four or eight.

Long before 2016, however, holders
of U.S. public debt will stop buying Treasury bills or
start demanding higher interest rates to cover the
growing risk of a default.

This week, a smoke detector went
off. China, in December, had unloaded $45 billion of its
$790 billion in T-bills. Is Beijing is bailing out?

To assure the world we are not
Greece writ large, the United States must soon adopt a
visible plan for slashing the deficit.

There are three ways to do it. One
is through growth that increases the tax revenue flowing
into the Treasury and reduces the outflow for safety net
programs like unemployment insurance.

But growth only comes slowly and
can take us only so far.

Needed is a combination of big
budget cuts and tax hikes. But the only place one can
get budget cuts of the magnitude required is from the
big entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare and
Medicaid. And the only place to get revenue of that
magnitude is by raising taxes on the American middle
class.

And here is where Barack Obama hits
the wall.

Republicans are not going to give
him a single vote for a tax increase. Not only would
this violate a commitment most made to the people who
elected them, it would be politically suicidal. For
behind the GOP today, and its best hope of recapturing
Congress in 2010, are the
Tea Party irregulars.

And Tea Partiers now play the role
of
Red Army commissars who sat at machine guns behind
their own troops to shoot down any soldier who retreated
or ran. Republicans who sign on to tax hikes cannot go
home again.

Consider: Arlen Specter voted for
the Obama stimulus and faced an immediate primary
challenge from Pat Toomey, who took a 20-point lead,
forcing
Specter to quit the party to survive.
Popular Gov. Charlie Crist embraced Obama on a Florida
visit and got an immediate
primary challenge from Marco Rubio, who now looks to
be the next senator from Florida.

The Tea Party folks are not into
the
Gerald Ford politics of compromise and consensus.
They have seen what it produces: the inexorable growth
of Government.

"There isn't a single sitting member of Congress—not one—that doesn't
know exactly where we're headed. ... And to use the
politics of fear and hate and division on each
other—we're at a point right now where it doesn't make a
damn whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, if
you've forgotten you're an American."

Simpson is right in his assertion
that anti-tax Republicans went along with George W.
Bush's spending spree—for two wars, prescription drug
benefits under Medicare and No Child Left Behind.

Where he is mistaken is in
suggesting "fear and hate" are behind the opposition to tax hikes. History,
principle and honest politics explain much of that
hostility.

Ronald Reagan, who consented to tax
hikes in the
1982 TEFRA bill, told this writer he was swindled.
Promised three dollars in spending cuts for each dollar
in tax increases, he got the reverse.

George H.W. Bush won election by
pledging:
"Read my lips! No new taxes!" He broke his pledge, leaving many
of the faithful with egg all over their faces. That may
have cost him the presidency.

Principled conservatives are
resisting tax hikes because they believe government has
grown too huge for the good of the country. And if that
means putting the beast on a starvation diet—no new tax
revenue to batten on—so be it. Cold turkey time.

Anticipating gains in November,
Republicans will not give Obama any new taxes before
then. After November, their ranks swollen by Tea Party
support, they will be even more intractable.

Where does that leave Obama—and us?

Later this year or early next, to
avoid a debt crisis, Obama will ask Congress to raise
taxes and pare back entitlement programs.

Republicans will fight the taxes to
the last ditch. Democrats, having lost dozens of
colleagues in the November massacre, will rebel against
the cuts in social spending.